The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Blazed Trail, by Stewart Edward White

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Title: The Blazed Trail

Author: Stewart Edward White

Posting Date: January 28, 2009 [EBook #3413]
Release Date: September, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLAZED TRAIL ***

Produced by Douglas E. Levy

THE BLAZED TRAIL

By Stewart Edward White

TO MY FATHER--From whose early pioneer life are drawn many of Harry
Thorpe's experiences.

CONTENTS

PART I: THE FOREST

PART II: THE LANDLOOKER

PART III: THE BLAZING OF THE TRAIL

PART IV: THORPE'S DREAM GIRL

PART V: THE FOLLOWING OF THE TRAIL

PART I: THE FOREST

Chapter I

When history has granted him the justice of perspective, we shall know
the American Pioneer as one of the most picturesque of her many figures.
Resourceful, self-reliant, bold; adapting himself with fluidity to
diverse circumstances and conditions; meeting with equal cheerfulness of
confidence and completeness of capability both unknown dangers and the
perils by which he has been educated; seizing the useful in the lives
of the beasts and men nearest him, and assimilating it with marvellous
rapidity; he presents to the world a picture of complete adequacy which
it would be difficult to match in any other walk of life. He is a strong
man, with a strong man's virtues and a strong man's vices. In him the
passions are elemental, the dramas epic, for he lives in the age when
men are close to nature, and draw from her their forces. He satisfies
his needs direct from the earth. Stripped of all the towns can give
him, he merely resorts to a facile substitution. It becomes an affair of
rawhide for leather, buckskin for cloth, venison for canned tomatoes.
We feel that his steps are planted on solid earth, for civilizations
may crumble without disturbing his magnificent self-poise. In him we
perceive dimly his environment. He has something about him which
other men do not possess--a frank clearness of the eye, a swing of the
shoulder, a carriage of the hips, a tilt of the hat, an air of muscular
well-being which marks him as belonging